It is practically carved in stone among conservatives and the GOP that the more money the rich and corporations make, the better off everyone else will be. This is called alternately “Reaganomics”, “Supply Side Economics”, “Trickle Down Economics” or, as Bush Sr., the far more intelligent of the Bush presidents, put it: “Voodoo Economics”. The most recent nickname for this is “Uncertainty” as in, “Everything is so uncertain, we have to make sure businesses feel secure enough to hire by lowering their taxes.”

The concept is that corporations will take their profits and hire more workers and reinvest in the United States. Sounds good. We have 30 years worth of empirical data to check that against but let’s skip all that because there will complaints about bias and liberal lies, etc.

Let’s just focus on the last three years. In 2008, the economy imploded. It doesn’t matter who caused it for the purposes of this thought exercise. It happened and millions of people lost their jobs and savings. Three years later, the stock markets are up, corporations are reporting record profits (profits, mind you, not just revenue) and CEOs are getting paid more than they did just 2 years ago, some of them vastly more.

The New York Times reports:

In the fourth quarter, profits at American businesses were up an astounding 29.2 percent, the fastest growth in more than 60 years. Collectively, American corporations logged profits at an annual rate of $1.678 trillion.

The article goes on to specify:

The median pay for top executives at 200 major companies was $9.6 million last year. That was a 12 percent increase over 2009

Good for them! By now, if the GOP is to be believed, we should be seeing all kinds of job production, reinvestments and awesome golden rivers of happiness for all. After all, in red states all over the country they’re lowering taxes on these very same businesses so obviously the boom times are back if they can afford to do THAT!

Except they’re not.

What many of these executives aren’t doing, however, is hiring. Unemployment, although down from its peak, stood at 8.8 percent in March. And few economists predict the jobless rate will drop substantially anytime soon.

Wait. WHUUUUT?! How can that possibly be? We just spent months fighting over lower taxes for these people because they needed to be reassured that they wouldn’t be put out of business by a few extra percent on their taxes. $1.678 trillion (that’s with a “T”) is a whole hell of a lot of profit. Are we supposed to believe that corporations are still too shaky to hire?

Is ANYONE stupid enough to still believe that giving them more of OUR money is going to magically make them hire back all the people they fired? They’re raking it in hand over fist. Where’s the incentive to give back to the communities they’re bleeding dry? They won’t even pay the taxes they owe and we’re expecting them to reinvest out of the goodness of their corporate hearts?

Question? How do you get half the popualtion of a country to vote for economic suicide?